This is a proud moment. FIRST, congratulations to Elizabeth Heafner, Alethea Lin, Alexa Connors, Ivy Zhong, Joseph Coyle, and Yiqi Liu for the publication of long-ranging project, the one-pot enol silane formation-allylation of ketones with allyl propionates, in Synthesis! The article appeared online in late 2022, but I’ve been holding off on this announcement for reasons I’ll get to below. While the suspense builds, this is a fantastic time to say a little about what Alethea discovered and Elizabeth expanded into a massive scope: At the end of Elizabeth’s time at UR, she began investigating the regioselectivity of differentiated allylating agents in this reaction, the type of study we’d never really attempted with our TMSOTf chemistry, and she bootstrapped it into a thoughtful and controlled series of experiments that set the stage for Alexa, Ivy, and Joseph to finish the project. The Covid-19 pandemic slowed progress to a crawl, as did some surprisingly difficult substrate syntheses, but Alexa finally drove the last nail into the project about a year ago, and we submitted the paper.
SECOND: So, why has it taken so long for the final version of this paper to appear? For a very special reason. In April of 2022, my Ph.D. advisor, world-famous chemist David Evans, passed away at the age of 81. Just weeks later, we received an invitation from the journal Synthesis, whose editors had decided to put together an issue in honor of Dave. Because Alexa and Joseph were nearing completion of the allylation project, I decided to accept the invitation, and we submitted the completed manuscript in July of 2022. The paper was accepted that fall, but it took a while for many of Dave’s former students and colleagues to finish up their own submissions, so only now has the final version appeared.
It is a tremendous honor to be included in the pages of this special issue of Synthesis. I look down the list of authors in the table of contents and see so many old friends, associates, and advisors, including my friend Jason Tedrow who acted as a mentor to me throughout my early years in the Evans group at Harvard and introduced me to the glory of reaction development.
If you’re lucky enough to have access to Synthesis, which requires a personal or institutional subscription (UR doesn’t have one, sadly), you can access our new paper at this link.
Even without a subscription, you can scroll the table of contents to see the list of all-star authors at this link, and you can read Erick Carreira’s excellent but all-too-brief obituary of Dave by clicking here.
This is an amazing moment for me. David Evans was an astonishingly insightful and generous mentor and scientist, and a model educator.